Yoda's Brick

Here is a shot I did for EWU's Alumni Association. Their recent campaign to pave the Hello Walk in front of Showalter Hall has had a measure of success. It appears that Yoda of Star Wars fame was actually an alumni of Eastern Washington University. I thought it would make an interesting Stumble! so I flagged it and tagged it "Star Wars Yoda Brick Quote". As of a few minutes ago It recieved 1,524 hits. Pretty remarkable considering that the University's next most viewed photograph has a little over 500 and has been up for about nine months. Props to StumbleUpon and the power of Star Wars.

StumbleUpon as a Marketing Tool

Yesterday after implementing StumbleUpon tools including the Firefox toolbar I decided to do a little test. I picked one of my photo from a trip I had to Cannon Beach in January of this year. The light was great and the Nikon D60 performed admirable for its first time out of the box. I clicked on the "I like it!" button on the StumbleUpon toolbar. The results the next day were remarkable.



One great thing that flickr does is analytics on referring websites. This makes StumbleUpon a unique marketing tool that is measurable and trackable. You can clearly see just how effective StumbleUpon can be below. Similar to YouTube in it concept of channels, a user can tailor their stumbles to their own likes. Similarly your online content that you refer to StumbleUpon will be viewed only be users who have made a conscious decision to see content similar to yours.



The process I am developing is to incorporate this involves creating interesting, compelling assets then throw them out to social networks via facebook, twitter and StumbleUpon and ba-da-bing you have a pseudo-viral marketing campaign.

StumbleUpon Buttons

I've recently been turned on to StumbleUpon by a co-worker. It is a website that is truly web surfing at its best. Instead of surfing by keywords or by links on a webpage, you surf by recommendations. Basically it's social networking where someone else does the surfing and you reap the benefits.

There is a toolbar you can download for Firefox that is utterly simple. Just click on the "Stumble!" button then you are off to some of the most interesting sites on the web. There is a log-on and a profile that you can create where you can tailor your stumble to different criteria. Mine include graphic design, photography and guitar. You can also send a stumble to your contacts which I have use quite a lot. Another feature is the "I like it!" button. It works rather like Pandora's thumbs up thumbs down feature and tailors future stumbles to your liking.

I found another tool to integrate StumbleUpon into other applications. I found it as a stumble from StumbleUpon itself. The Buttons & Tools is a another simple code generator that gives you many great options on the size of the button you wish to add to your blog. As you may have noticed I put a StumbleUpon button on the bottom of each of my blog entries. Now an interesting blog entry can be contributed to the global pool of stumbles.